Featured Domains

Lawyer wins UDRP over his personal names, but battle still looms over family domain names.

Last week I wrote about how first amendment attorney Marc J. Randazza had filed a lawsuit against detractor Crystal Cox over a number of domain names she registered.

In addition to registering domain names including Marc Randazza’s name, she also registered domain names referring to Randazza’s wife and three-year-old child.

Randazza alleges that Cox registered the domain names and then tried to extort him, going so far as to offer search engine reputation management services to clean up his name in search results.

Prior to the lawsuit, on July 27, Randazza filed a UDRP with WIPO covering a handful of domain names including marcrandazza.com and other versions of his name.

A decision in that case was just handed down by WIPO in Randazza’s favor (pdf).

Cox tried to argue that she was just exercising free speech by registering the domains to criticize Randazza. But the panel didn’t buy it:

In any event, for purposes of the Policy the Panel finds the Respondent’s intention, as reflected by the record, was never to solely provide, through her websites, speech critical of the complainant. Rather, her objective in both registering and using the disputed names was apparently to engage in a rather sinister and tenacious scheme to extort money from the Complainant. specifically, the Respondent first posted negative and false commentary on her websites that was intentionally calculated to injure the Complainant’s on-line reputation and disrupt the Complainant’s business conducted through his law firm. Thereafter, the Respondent used those sites in a manner that apparently optimized their ranking on the Google search engine in order to increase their visibility and prominence on search results yielded through a Google search of the Complainant, thus likely exacerbating the injury caused to the Complainant. Once all this occurred, the Respondent then offered her reputational management services to the Complainant through which, for a considerable fee, she would remediate the Complainant’s on-line reputation by eliminating all the negative and false commentary of her own making and presumably also ceasing her use of the disputed domain names. Basically, for a price, she would undo the injury to the Complainant for which she was responsible for having created in the first place. This egregious conduct clearly constitutes bad faith under the Policy.

Lawyer involved in domain disputes files his own cybersquatting lawsuit to protect his family’s names.

Now this is a bizarre case.

You may have heard of first amendment lawyer Marc Randazza before. He’s by all accounts a colorful character, and he was the one who represented the owner of glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com against Glenn Beck in a UDRP.

It sounds like at some point he caught the attention of “investigative blogger” Crystal Cox.

In a lawsuit (pdf) filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Nevada, Randazza alleges that Cox registered the domain name marcrandazza.com and then tried to extort money from him.

Randazza alleges that when that failed, Cox registered the name of his wife, jenniferrandazza.com. She next registered the name of his (then) three-year-old daughter.

According to the suit, Cox then offered “reputation management” services to Randazza to clean up search engine results related to Randazza. The plaintiffs allege these negative search engine results were created by Cox.

The suit says this isn’t the first time Cox has followed this pattern. Check out the bizarre story of a lawsuit that caught mainstream attention (apparently for the wrong headline). Here’s another description of the events.

Randazza is suing Cox for cybersquatting — and admits that this won’t necessarily stop Cox from ranting about Randazza:

It is important to note that this lawsuit is not about defamation nor about Ms. Cox expressing her opinions. Cox has every right to express her opinions. However, she does not have the right to do so in a manner which is contrary to Title 15’s mandates, nor does she have the right to do so in a manner that is harassing or invasive. Cox posting her opinion on crystalcox.com is just fine. Posting on an obsessive number of continually expanding websites, created for the sole purpose of trying to crowd out any other opposing views, trying to make her ranting ubiquitous, is
not. An off-line analogy would be Ms. Cox standing in front of Mr. Randazza’s office picketing the Plaintiff’s law firm. Plaintiffs would have no objection to her doing so. However, if Cox followed Mr. Randazza from work to home and his children from school to home and his wife from home to the grocery store and then stood outside Mr. Randazza’s house, banging a drum while protesting all day and all night, the law would look beyond the content and look at the time, place and manner of her activities, and certainly not find them to be protected or proper.